New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

 

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

 

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

 

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

 

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

 

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

 

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

 

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

 

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

 

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

 

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

 

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

 

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

 

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

 

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

 

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

A Red(neck) Tory

 The Kalends of January  is upon us once again.  Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent.  We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle.  The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before.  Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke's Gospel.  The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.  Far more recently it became New Year's Day on the civil calendar.

This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand.  I very much miss Reese's column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell's website.  If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.

Lets start with the basics.  I am a Canadian.  I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian.  Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the "51st state" and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life.  I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him.  I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.  

I often use T. S. Eliot's famous description of himself as a "royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature" to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter.  I don't apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds.  When I say I am a Tory, I don't mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot's triad.

Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title.  In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton,  basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called "Red" due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism.  This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other.  In Grant's case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don't.  Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest.  I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love.  I put  "Red" in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition  should be replaced by what is called "conservatism" in the United States (see previous paragraph).  The "neck" is added to indicate that I don't have any sympathy with socialism  nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word "redneck."  Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel's "Simple Man" for a picture of what that means.

As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a "royalist in politics" as Eliot put it.  The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings.  The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe.  The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects.  That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by "experts" in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as dysfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models.  The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king.  The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings.  Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany.  By contrast, "Freedom", as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says "Wears a Crown".  I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king's government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.

Turning to  "Anglo-Catholic in religion," the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone.  I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants.   This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary.  When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant.  I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths.  We must indeed hold the Scriptures supreme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible) but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers.  The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church's two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament.  I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.

I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made acquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance.  My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father's family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born.  My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers.  It was through reading  Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter.  In Bethlehem, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person.  He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who "taketh away the sin of the world" and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours.  The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution.  Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accommodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United  which at some point around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator.  I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and  had even less respect for it after.   For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized  Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.

When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism.  I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.  Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards  the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.

Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora.  The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word.  Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered.  Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.  

As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of "five fundamentals" drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches.  When I joined the  Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but  I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist.  This is how I would say that I am "Anglo-Catholic in religion", although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than "praise and worship" songs in which the most used words are "me" "myself" and "I", which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today. 

I would probably replace "literature" with "culture" in Eliot's "classicist in literature."    Classicism is the position that man's creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules,  and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music.  That which is "classic" is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as "old", but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless.  Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper.  Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word.  Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new.  If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators.  Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message.  War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace.  A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period.  It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme.  The poem "In Flanders' Field" was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts.  The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created.  Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture.  Picasso's paintings and Schoenberg's music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be  confused with "pop" culture the distinguishing characteristic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics.   The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.  

These are the essence of my Toryism.  In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner.  I arrived at Anglo-catholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary.  As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged  me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain's remark that "everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them" I responded with "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read them.

Clearly my Toryism is not what calls  itself "conservatism" these days.  I am closest to today's conservatives when it comes to what they are against.  I oppose abortion and what is now called "Medical Assistance in Dying" because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one's country in war, which are not).  That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves.  Ending "catch and release" is not enough, however, over a century's worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime.  As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes.  Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs.  Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.

 I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties.   I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of "the other" at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization.  The point is not that racial or cultural "otherness" is an insurmountable roadblock to someone's becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail's book.  As Enoch Powell put it "it is a matter of numbers."

I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of "anti-racism", the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of "anti-imperialism" and "anti-colonialism," the movement that in the name of "rights" is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word "wokeness" has come to denote.  Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950's and 1960's, American liberalism.  My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan.   I  cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman.  This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative.  Each successive wave of "feminism" has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, "vive la différence" as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes.  "The personal is the political" was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes.  For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock's "The Woman Question" and to Dr. Johnson's observation  that "nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little."

I am much further from "conservatives" when it comes to the things they are for.  I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient.  The things that "conservatives" say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism.  They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a "conservative" today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday's liberalism against the changes proposed by today's. 

The most consistent things today's "conservatives" are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well.  That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out.  Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage.  Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines.  The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change.  A repeat  of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable.   I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism.  The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18).  Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.  

Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism.  Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same.  Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade.  I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph.  That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted.  American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade.  Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one's neighbour has become glaringly obvious.  Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that.  Add David Orchard's The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list.  As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency.  Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced.  Usury, however, turns a country's monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced.  Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.

Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these.  That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too. 

The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education.  Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early.  I oppose this too.  Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine.  The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar - Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  See Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning."  Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like "Woke" history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed "the Whig Interpretation of History" but as John Lukacks' "remembered past" that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history."  It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government.

Happy New Year

God Save the King!

Hier Stehe Ich!

 Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year's Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write.  It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.   I have often used Dr. Luther's famous "Here I Stand" as the title in one language or another.   This year it is the German original.  Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same.   Each year I have to resist  the temptation to  just point to T. S Eliot's "Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature" and say ditto.   I usually do make reference to Eliot's famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself.  I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country's traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister's Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for.  I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College - at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary - in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an "Anglo-Catholic in religion"?  If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I's martyred Archbishop William  Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes.     If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant.   I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al.  got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state.   I have far less sympathy for the tendency that  manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a "this will have to do for now" type attitude.   The Vincentian Canon, "that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all", and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church's leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West.   I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult.  As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church - the Apostles' and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol - as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus  their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower  orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ's One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine.  Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a  Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God's written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to "criticism" based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book.   Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these "sources" in a pre-"redaction" state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text).  Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God's book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot.  So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith,  that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a "royalist in politics" should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website.   I will add here that I am also a monarchist.   For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable.   It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both.   I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument.   I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life.   While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from  memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible.   Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics.  Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable.   The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy's essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey.  I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago.   I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy.   Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity.   God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists.  In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form - think Plato here - of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be.   This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity - traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism - saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as  Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title "King of Kings" by saying "no king but King Jesus".   

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory.   The words "conservative" and "right-wing" as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose.   Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age.   It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time.   The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism's false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely.   The Left also worships liberalism's false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal.   A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man's problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership.   From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.   Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression  arising out of American racial grievance politics, "wokeness".   "Wokeness" is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx's "haves" and "have nots") but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc.   Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today's Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left.   Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed.   The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God.   Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs' sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a "classicist in literature" I think that if we take this to  mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold's "the best that has been thought and said" this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well.   It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture.   I have striven to follow this goal on and off again - it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today - with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions.   Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards.   I read Mark Twain's remark that a "classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" years ago and thought to myself "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months.   Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a "Sez you, Tom Fleming" response.   Today, as the Left in its "woke" form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with "the best that has been thought and said".   This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be.   So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and  encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι

It is the Kalends of January once again.   On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year's Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.   On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when "eight maids a-milking" is one's true love's gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.   This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.   As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.   I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.   Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.  I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese's recommendation in this matter.

This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.   It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.   It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say "see last year's essay".  The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation "Here I Stand" from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.   It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023.

I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by "Canada" is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.   If anyone is offended by this mention of our country's founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it  no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.   I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated  pretty much smack in  the middle of the country.  While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.   I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.   In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.   This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour's drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.   

I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.   That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.    This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being "born again".   Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus' nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term "believe", so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus' introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as "invite Jesus into your heat" and "make a commitment to Christ".   Infer from that what you will.   My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.   I had had some religious instruction as a child.   My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord's Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.   No, this is not because I am extremely old - I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.   The Bible and the Lord's Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.   At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons' New Testament that I had been given - in school - when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.   I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.   We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.   When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.

While I was still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.   Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.  Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.   I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism - a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith - they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.   Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.   That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.   I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: "In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est", which means "So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all."  Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.   In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent's canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.    While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church - and God has established authority in the Church - and her traditions - beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad - are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.    Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches - the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth - and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic as well - a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.   It holds the same view of Church history - that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history - that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah's Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call "cults", although ironically what distinguishes the "cults" from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.   I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.    Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.    Nobody has been able to devise a  better form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.   Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood - this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood - and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the  title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself  soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve "Apostle" for those directly commissioned by Christ.   This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.    Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient  sources.   While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don't would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,  traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric - or perhaps autocentric - focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and  encouraging familiarity over reverence.

I describe myself as a Tory.   I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.   There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.   When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.   As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.   It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned  about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.   Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about "our democracy" but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.  While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.   Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.   The "Forms" that feature so prominently in Plato's dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.   An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.   While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another - Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his  modified version of the Forms, were not in some other realm but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied - for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.    Modern abstract ideals are not like that.   The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.   I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the "democracy" that is this kind of ideal.   In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about "our democracy" have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.   Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase "our democracy" more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.   Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because "democracy" as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.   No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.

Since this - believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality - is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.    I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.

Parliament needs monarchy.   The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.   He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.   There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.   Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by "proportional representation" - another abstract ideal - which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.   Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.   He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.   While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.   In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.   

When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.   This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.   This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by "conservative" the way they are essential to what I mean by "Tory".    What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.    

The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.   While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.   Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century "Whig Interpretation of History" associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.   Indeed, the very concept of "progress" when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.   This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.   Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.    Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world - in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.  Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man's fall into Original Sin.    Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.  While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.   In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history's end.   Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.   It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.   I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most  valuable parts of our civilization's heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.   Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.   The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.   The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.   In the early twentieth century a new "liberalism" emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.   The conservative movement that  arose in the United States after World War II  was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.   It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.

There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.   I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.   The first is the following:

- Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called "medical assistance in dying".

- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.

- There are three genders - masculine, feminine, neuter - but these are properties of words not people.

- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being - not so difficult to define now, was that?)

- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.

- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.

- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.

- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.

- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.   If a child fails to learn he should be held back.   If he learns he should be rewarded.   If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.   If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.   The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.

-  The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.   If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.   He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.   Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.   It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true "cruel and unusual punishment".

-  The guilt for crimes - again, real crimes of the type just listed - is the perpetrator's and not society's.

-  Drugs of the type that alter one's mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.   While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.

- Government policy should be natalistic - encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population - and friendly to the traditional family - encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.   It should not do the opposite - promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.   It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.

- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.   If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.   If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.

That was the first set.   The second is the following:

- Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.

- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.

- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.

- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.  If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if  the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.   Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.

The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.    Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.    This is yet another reason why I prefer "Tory" as I have explained it, to "conservative".

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!